The Fall of Language in the Age of English Reviewed By Wally Wood of Bookpleasures.com

Wally Wood

Reviewer Wally Wood:
Wally is a a professional writer and a member of the American Society
of Journalists and Authors. He holds a master's degree in creative
writing from the City University of New York as well as a bachelor's
degree from Columbia University where he majored in philosophy. As a
volunteer, he has taught writing in men's state prisons and to
middle-school students in his local library.

His first novel, Getting
Oriented: A Novel About Japan received positive reviews even from
people who do not know him. As a ghost-writer, he has written 19
business books, all published by commercial publishers. He has
recently published The Girl in the Photo which
is currently available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble as a trade
paperback or Kindle download.

Minae Mizumura's new
book—new for Western readers—is The Fall of Language in the Age
of English. It was originally published in Japan as When the Japanese
Language Falls: In the Age of English (Nihongo ga horobiru toki: Eigo
no seiki no naka de) in 2008 where it became an enormous best-seller.
The English version, translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters
Carpenter, is somewhat different from the original which addressed
Japanese readers. The Fall of Language in the Age of English makes a
more general, more universal argument.

Mizumura was born in Tokyo
in 1951, moved with her family to Long Island, New York, when she was
twelve years old. She lived in the States for twenty years but never
felt entirely at ease here. She studied French literature and
literary criticism at Yale as both an undergraduate and graduate
student. She has taught at Princeton, University of Michigan, and
Stanford and in The Fall of Language she gives her account of her
experience in the International Writing Program at the University of
Iowa in 2003. She currently lives in Tokyo.

Her book makes a clear
distinction between a local language, a national language, and a
universal language. A local language is the one you grow up speaking;
it may or may not have a writing system. As I understand her
argument, a local language in Italy is something like Neapolitan,
Calabrese, Sicilian, Venetian—more than a dialect or an accent—a
language that outsiders cannot understand; the national language
would be Italian. In Japan, local languages include Tohoku-ben,
Kansai-ben, Hakata-ben, and more; the national language is Japanese.
A national language Mizumura says "is an elevated form of a
local language" and a country like Belgium might have two
national languages.

A universal language is
one used internationally for science, business, diplomacy, and more.
In the middle ages, Latin was a universal language. Today, thanks to
British colonial efforts, trade and US strength after WWII, English
has become the universal language. More Chinese may speak Mandarin,
but "what makes a language 'universal' has nothing to do with
how many native speakers there are, and everything to do with how
many people use it as their second language . . . What matters is
that English is already used and will continue to be used by the
greatest number of nonnative speakers in the world." (Italics in
the original.)

One of the things this
means is that translation becomes far more important than most people
realize. If an author writes in her local or national language, her
readers are only those who can read it. If an author writes in
English, her prospective readers are all over the world, not only in
the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Many more
Japanese are able to read a novel in English than Americans are able
to read a novel in Japanese. This suggests that if an ambitious
author wants a wide audience, she ought to write in English even
though her native language may be Hausa, Tagalog, Tswana, or
Tigrinya.

Translation, however, is
at best a limited answer to the challenge of literature written in
languages other than English. As Mizumura points out "the works
that are usually translated into English are those that are both
thematically and linguistically the easiest to translate, that often
only reinforce the worldview constructed by the English language, and
preferably that entertain readers with just the right kind of
exoticism." Readers therefore "are not condemned to know
that there is thus a perpetual hermeneutic circle—that in
interpreting the world, only 'truths' that can be perceived in
English exist as 'truths.'"

And machine translating,
while clearly improving almost weekly, has real problems with
languages remote from English like Japanese and Chinese. In a news
article or instruction manual where the meaning rests mostly on the
surface, a machine version may be adequate. But in a work of
literature where much of the meaning—and pleasure—is in the
nuance, the implications, the way words can resonate against one
another, machine translation, as I can testify from my own
experience, has a long, long way to go. And—sudden thought—by the
time it gets there, (which is not a sure thing), it may be useless
because English has so overwhelmed all other languages that no one is
bothering to write literature in her native language anyway.

Given her interest,
Mizumura has much to say about Japanese literature, its remarkable
florescence during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (i.e.,
during the Meiji and Taisho eras) and, in her opinion, its current
low state. Indeed, when her book was published in Japan, she was
attacked for her judgment: "She talks down about contemporary
Japanese literature, when even Americans say it's great!" As if
American opinion is the measure of quality.

I found the book
fascinating. Anyone interested in language, literature, Japan, or all
three can read The Fall of Language in the Age of English profitably.
Because most of us tend to think in our native language most of the
time, we are usually no more aware of it than a fish is of the water
in which it swims. Mizumura helps us consider the medium in which we
think and write, what we're doing, and the effect the spread of
English is having on the rest of humanity.